Re: I wrote some clever code - can the comment "defuse" it?

[ChemBoy]

I think the various viewpoints on your original question have all been covered adequately already, so I'm going to launch onto a slightly random tangent instead—is there a particular reason why  /\G(X|D+|L+)/g is preferable to the slightly less punctuated /X|D+|L+/g in this situation?

I might also have chosen to use a strategically placed local $, = ""; and "@property{@letter}" =~ // rather than a join, but I'm not going to ask why you didn't do that, since I admit that it probably falls well over the line into "too clever by half" territory. :-)

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If God had meant us to fly, he would *never* have given us the railroads.
    --Michael Flanders

[Aristotle]

I opted for this particular regex as a minor safety net. If any value in %property is ever something else than L, D, or X, the regex will fail at that point. That's just a smidgen better than letting the regex skip those silently, causing the splice to pull together the wrong things.

The latter would be too clever by a half indeed; the join is very clear in my mind, and if I wanted to make it more explicit, I'd use another temporary scalar at that point instead.

Makeshifts last the longest.